Pavel/Paul Eisner and His Translations of Kafka's Novels

The thesis provides an overview of the life and work of Pavel/Paul Eisner (1889-1958), a Czech translator of Jewish-German origin, focusing on his translation activities and "marginal" cultural identity, which served as the basis of his triple ghetto theory and "Prague interpretation" of the works of Franz Kafka. Eisner's translations of the novels The Castle and The Trial are examined using Gideon Toury's descriptive model of translation analysis, with the aim to determine their most prominent features and asses them in terms of their acceptability/adequacy in the target literature. The selected excerpts are subsequently compared with the source text to reconstruct the translator's method and find out in what way it was influenced by Eisner's theories on Kafka, stemming from his own life experience of a Prague German Jew. Key words: Pavel Eisner, Paul Eisner, Franz Kafka, triple ghetto, The Castle, The Trial, translation analysis, Gideon Tour